Ch.27Work Record 005 – Do Not Let the Witch Live (4)

The next day, fortunately, I was able to wake up in the morning. Though we were heading toward mid-November, and despite the sun not having risen yet, I could feel the muggy air approaching twenty degrees.

Los Angeles only remembered summer. Even then, it was fortunate that when rain poured for days, the heat subsided somewhat and a chilly air prevailed.

There was an unfamiliar object on my desk. Two homemade flash grenades were connected in the Bellwether style. A note was attached. It seemed to be from Valentina.

‘I was faster at preparing for next time too, wasn’t I? Use them well and don’t die, Boogeyman.’

Perhaps because she had discovered I was a former circuit racer, the word “faster” in her note seemed to carry extra emphasis. For former circuit racers, speed is everything. Being fast is being good.

At least next time, I could handle the situation without Nadia’s help. That is, if the flash grenades didn’t set the office on fire. After handling them a couple of times, I put them in my equipment box.

Only perfectly prepared equipment allows a person to respond effectively. The first task of the morning was, as always, cleaning my gun. A gun used daily needs daily maintenance. During this task, my mind becomes peaceful.

It was a familiar sensation, a nostalgic one. Since middle school, gun cleaning had always been how I started my mornings in the dormitory. I might miss that morning sound someday. The past is the past, and nostalgia is nostalgia.

After disassembling, thoroughly cleaning, and reassembling it, I put it back in my bag. Even on days when I hadn’t fired it, the thick smog would sometimes coat it like carbon residue.

After finishing gun maintenance, I checked my phone and saw a notification I’d never seen before. It was shaped like the Bellwether company logo… when I tapped it, I saw it was from the Mercenary Personnel Management Department.

My first private client? It was the perfect day for a job. I had rested well yesterday, and my physical condition was excellent. The gunshot wound on my side had healed without even leaving a scar. I tapped the connection that appeared on the screen.

With a motion that had become somewhat natural, I brought the phone to my ear. The strange awkwardness of handling what felt like an old-fashioned mobile phone from childhood in my twenties hadn’t completely disappeared.

After a brief connection tone, I heard a gruff voice. It was an elderly voice, but strangely full of vitality for an old person.

“Up early, I see. Listen, Metzgerhund. You don’t have any private contract experience, but you’ve handled plenty of public contracts through the office. You build experience, I get my problem solved cheaply. I’ve got a good job for you. What do you say?”

“Metzger… what? Anyway, since it’s my first private job, I can give you a discount. As you said, building experience is more important for me. What’s the job?”

The sharp pronunciation made it sound like German. Bellwether had started as a German company, so I knew a bit. Metzgerhund was a term I’d heard somewhere before.

“You don’t even know what a Metzgerhund is. Anyway, I opened a small restaurant in this neighborhood, and gangs are already coming around demanding protection money.”

A restaurant, and gangs. Those trying to extort from restaurants aren’t major gangs. It would be better to hire an individual mercenary rather than employing an entire mercenary company. I got confirmation of my assumption.

“Seems like there are four or five of them… if you clean them all up, I’ll deposit 1,200 credits, nice and clean. I just opened my place, so I can’t do more than that. And I said I’d give you a discount.”

Twelve hundred credits… about a third of the monthly salary I received at Bellwether. The money earned protecting people versus killing people differed quite a bit in amount. The amount seemed reasonable. The mercenary business has significant fixed costs.

Fortunately, even if I got injured, I wouldn’t lose much money or take long to heal. In that respect, I was starting far ahead of other mercenaries. I finished calculating in my head.

“You’ll provide all the information, right? You seem so efficient—were you from a major corporation?”

“I’m also from Bellwether, so I contacted someone from Bellwether Security Training to give them some experience. I’ll provide all the information. I’ve got photos too. Just sent them.”

I briefly took the phone from my ear to check the screen. There were five photos, so clean they looked as if they’d been enhanced several times. The middle two had quite similar faces.

In the photos, I could almost smell the metallic scent of crude cybernetic implants. After checking the attached map, I put the phone back to my ear and said:

“Looks good. I’ll handle it and report back. It’s a verbal contract, but Stephanet will verify it…”

As I said that, a contract based on our conversation was transmitted. It was convenient to be able to use Stephanet when communicating through Bellwether.

And the fact that Stephanet had drafted a contract meant these five targets were indeed gang members. The contract listed confirmed criminal allegations along with kill authorization.

Rehabilitation is a privilege. Whether someone deserves that privilege is determined by the life they’ve lived. Bellwether’s eyes saw possibility, not hope.

“Perfect. The contract is clean, the job is clear… I’ll probably finish before lunchtime. I’ll contact you when it’s done.”

“Excellent. I expect maximum productivity. If you really finish before lunch, I’ll buy you lunch separate from the job payment.”

It was a common Bellwether farewell, but quite an old one. When did he work there? Probably decades ago. When Berlin was still a city. If he had been active, he would have been a senior colleague.

It’s not something to be thankful about that he was never active. Bellwether was a company that moved only for efficiency. Expecting preferential treatment for former employees would be inefficient and something to be despised.

After hanging up, I took off my t-shirt, put on body armor first, then put the t-shirt back on. With a synthetic leather coat over it, the body armor wasn’t visible. I also packed my carbine in my bag.

Before leaving, there was one thing I needed to check. I went to the adjacent duty room where I sensed Tina’s presence and knocked lightly. After saying “It’s me,” the door opened.

Nadia was inside too. After waving a small greeting, I made eye contact with Tina, who was holding a nugget box with a photo of someone saying they no longer felt like imitation food.

“Whaat, seeing you with body armor, looks like you’re going to work… You don’t need a driver, right? We can’t leave just Nadia in the office. Right.”

“It would be funny to ask for a driver after accepting a private job, wouldn’t it? I was wondering if there’s a spare car or bike I could borrow instead of calling a separate driver.”

Tina twirled the ends of her light brown hair, which she had tied back, and gave her usual good-natured, relaxed smile.

“I do have one I bought a while back to completely strip down and modify. But modifying bikes is insane even for circuit racers, so I could lend you one? Just don’t break it. Okay?”

“Before” would mean when she was still an active circuit racer, so it must be from a few years ago. For a used vehicle, that’s more than satisfactory. I nodded cleanly and said:

“With the money I have now, I’d barely be able to buy something from the ’80s. Something you bought a few years ago is perfect.”

Tina took one of the many car keys attached to the wall and handed it to me. Among them, I noticed the key to the modified vehicle she had driven out last time. She grinned again.

“I thought two flash grenades was a bit stingy for someone who protected us and didn’t rat out Nadia. Did you review the private job properly?”

“Of course I did. Want to see the contract?”

Tina nodded with an unnecessarily fussy expression, but after reading the contract, she lightly patted my armored back as if there was nothing to doubt.

“Whoever wrote it did a good job following the manual. Take care, Boogeyman.”

With confirmation from a senior colleague, I could trust there was no problem with the job. With my gun bag slung over my shoulder and a motorcycle helmet with ballistic lining, I left.

The sky looked like it might pour rain. The bike key Tina gave me fit perfectly with a vehicle parked in the office parking lot. A ’94 model. Still quite new, and still commonly seen on the roads.

The storage compartment under the seat was large enough for my carbine bag, and fortunately, it was very similar to the model I had trained on when getting my license at Bellwether. When megacorporations proliferate, products become very similar.

After checking the map, I started driving, trying to visualize the marked route on the road ahead. Without a computational assist device, I had to rely solely on memory.

Still, the route wasn’t difficult. I crossed Sepulveda Boulevard, filled with the stench of a rotten sea, heading toward the slums by the coast. I reached the coastal area that bore only traces of once being a wealthy neighborhood.

I’d heard the sea purifies itself. Perhaps in another twenty years, the sea would be clean again. By then, real estate companies would bring in customer relocation support teams to sweep away this coastal area.

But not yet. For now, this place was still a slum. It had been for who knows how long. I continued along the coast a bit further and entered the slum area. Without removing my helmet, I took the bag from under the seat.

The destination was only a few hundred meters away. I took out my phone and connected to Stephanet through the mercenary management application. She had erased me from her memory. She didn’t know me.

“This is Arthur Murphy, general employee of Night Watch. I’ve arrived at the job destination. Can you designate a 100-meter radius around the destination as a job execution zone?”

Stephanet responded professionally. This was always how she sounded to non-employees.

“The area has been designated as a job execution zone. I wish you good performance. Disconnecting.”

Now, even if gunshots were heard in the designated area, no one would come. Neither Bellwether’s mobile units nor the LAPD, who wouldn’t bother with small matters.

I rode the bike into the job execution zone. When I had a computational assist device in my head, the job execution—or back then, work execution—zone was visually distinguished in my augmented vision.

Not anymore. I arrived at the house mentioned in the client’s information. It seemed to have once been someone’s vacation home but was now abandoned. The house looked decent but was extremely dilapidated.

From inside, voices could be faintly heard. Gripping my carbine with the selector switch set to full auto, I quietly eavesdropped.

“Hey, they say there’s a mercenary around here. Not for us, right?”

“I don’t think so. The guys next door were making a racket yesterday; they must have done something. They’ve designated a zone before even arriving. I ran a radio scan, and there’s no one around.”

Apparently, trying to collect protection money in Bellwether’s city isn’t even considered a wrongdoing. While waiting by the door, I heard someone kicking inside.

“Hey, asshole. Don’t you remember how some guy broke into a house and started shooting last time? Go out and check!”

I briefly thought that even without designating a job zone, no one would have come just because of gunshots in this neighborhood. No drones were visible in the sky.

I waited at the door. Footsteps approached from inside. The sound of sneakers on cracked marble floors briefly echoed, and then the old wooden door opened. Our eyes met.

I deliberately drew the pistol I had kept at my waist for better acoustics. I pulled the trigger. Despite being just a pistol, the gunshot echoed loudly. Wires snapped, electricity sparked, and blood splattered.

I was glad I wore a helmet. From the voices, the remaining people were on the left side of the house. After pulling the trigger a few more times toward the left wall, I shouted:

“I’ve got the one who slapped the restaurant owner, so I’ll just hand the rest of you over to Bellwether’s mobile unit. You know you can get out in a few days if you claim you have nothing to do with this guy. Disarm and come out.”

I switched to my carbine with the selector set to full auto. After what sounded like an exasperated sigh, two men who looked like twins walked out of the room. They had replaced opposite sides of their bodies with cybernetics.

They might have been conjoined twins. Their faces matched those in the contract. Behind them came a disheveled blonde woman, also in the contract. And a man with blue fluorescent tattoos trying to imitate a shepherd—all five accounted for.

One of the twins grinned, raising the corner of his mouth. From his angle, he couldn’t see the selector switch.

“See, I told you! If we hadn’t sent him out, one of you would be lying at the door. We’ll hand over the culprit to our mercenary friend, and we’ll live. Isn’t that great?”

I slowly lowered the muzzle that had been pointing toward the ceiling. The other twin spoke with a nervous voice:

“Wait a second. Has this mercenary bastard reported that the job is fini—”

If no one else was coming out, I just needed to cleanly handle these four. You don’t believe what the enemy says. Words you must believe don’t come directly from the enemy. They come down from their higher-ups to our higher-ups.

I aimed the muzzle at them and lightly squeezed the trigger. The blue fluorescent tattoo began to shimmer a dark purple, covered in red.

The twin who had been intelligent enough to be suspicious survived a bit longer, crawling on the floor trying to escape through the back door, but the one who hadn’t even been suspicious fell forward with his jaw and nape pierced.

The woman with dull eyes, obviously a drug addict, was pinned under him, but she probably didn’t mind being pinned. I walked into the house. I aimed at the head of the gang member crawling on the floor and pulled the trigger.

He went limp. If not for the gunshot, it might have looked like he had fallen asleep on the marble floor, decayed from drug use. I put one more bullet in the head of each of the remaining four as confirmation. Now the job was done.

Small talk can wait until after the job is finished. I finally answered the question that the somewhat intelligent twin had asked:

“No, I didn’t. Because the job wasn’t finished. Now it is.”

I took out my phone. Removing my blood-splattered helmet, I pressed the Bellwether mercenary management application to connect with Stephanet.

“Job complete. Since it’s a slum, no cleanup team will come, so just connect to the camera and verify.”

“Understood. Connecting to camera. Connection pending. Connected. Please help me survey the scene.”

I showed the scene to Stephanet, who had quickly connected to the camera. All five were killed, and they matched the people in the contract. After confirming, Stephanet displayed a large green checkmark on the screen.

“Job completion confirmed. Would you like to connect with the client? Or would it be better to connect after moving to a safe location?”

“I’ll call after moving to a safe place. Thanks for the confirmation, Stephanet.”

After disconnecting, I got back on the bike and moved away from the coast with its terrible stench of decay. If I stayed there any longer, the smell might permeate my clothes. That was unacceptable.

After leaving the coastal slum, I rode until I saw megacorporation billboards around me, then parked the bike at a charging station and took out my phone. This place was safe enough.

“I’m in a safe place. Connect me to the client, Stephanet.”

Without a response, the call began connecting. Going through Stephanet was also the most efficient way to protect personal information you didn’t want to share with the other party. Soon the communication connected.

“Didn’t you say you’d handle it before lunch? The sun’s just about to rise, but you’re having an early lunch, Metzgerhund. I’ve sent the payment. I’ll give you the location of my place. Come over, and I’ll buy you breakfast at least.”

“That’s because I don’t have a clingy partner begging me to stay home. Ah, the location of your place… got it. I’ll be right there.”

The client’s restaurant was in the middle of a residential area. Not an upscale neighborhood with detached houses, but one full of villas and apartments where the wind, once it started blowing, would swirl into a vortex.